Bread and Oil

The comically-tiny street sweeper whirs up Via Giulia as I shift my weight, standing outside the forno. The customer in the bakery keeps up a running commentary, now leaning around the COVID-era plastic partition to gesture at Giovanna who nods, carefully placing pastries in a bag. I can see the customer is in no rush to leave. This is Umbria, where a quick errand is as common as poorly cooked pasta (I’ve never seen either), and I know I might as well make myself comfortable.

Luckily, my cadence has adapted to Umbrian rhythms, and I consider the wait an opportunity to lift my nose and savor the bakery’s scent winding into the autumnal fog. I let my gaze trace the ancient Roman wall. That wall—the remains of the Arco di Augosto—might not be a big deal to people who grew up with remnants of ancient civilizations stoically standing alongside stoplights, but my American-bred eyes never tire of admiring the forno nestled under the huge stones etched with ancient script. 

The customer finally runs out of gossip and adjusts her scarf before exiting the forno. We nod to each other and I step forward to the worn wood and glass door. It sticks a bit, the glass panels steamed from the warmth within so that Giovanna, now rearranging the items in the display case, has a sfumato glow. 

Entering the forno, you’d be hard pressed to imagine a smaller shop of any sort, let alone a bakery. There’s hardly room to turn around, so it’s funny to recall that before the pandemic limited the number of customers within, you’d get three or four people crammed into that space, arguing about the weather and popping their head around the corner to call to the men in their underwear and sneakers, baking loaf after loaf of unsalted Umbrian bread. 

As tiny as the forno is, the offerings are never the same two days in a row. Yes, there’s always pizza, but sometimes there will be zucchini flower pizza beside the standards of rosemary and tomato sauce. Or more often, onion—my favorite, those caramelized alliums bring out the yeastiness of the dough. I love serving them with an Umbrian lentil soup, or cubing them to enjoy with afternoon spritzes and a bowl of briny capers, harvested from the pink Subasio walls of Spello.

You can always find biscotti at the forno, but sometimes they are the almond ones you dip into a sweet after-dinner liquor (Tuscany’s Vin Santo is the obvious option, but here in Umbria, locals prefer our Sagrantino Passito); sometimes, instead, you’ll spot cookies the same shape as those traditional biscotti, but softly yielding, folded around prune or apricot jam. 

Get to the forno early enough in the morning and you’ll certainly find breakfast pastries, but there’s often a surprise alongside the standard fare of cornetti and donuts heavy with cream or Nutella. My eyes always light up when I spot the last treccia, a braided, walnut-filled pastry. My family will no doubt fight over it, but the earthy nuttiness that rounds out the edging of caramelized sugar is worth the battle.

Beyond the routine forno options of bread and biscotti and pizza and breakfast, our little triumph of a bakery almost always offers a little something different. Some experimental biscotti, perhaps, or little cakes with pine nuts. It’s a treat to spy the particular kind of sandwich on crackling flatbread that took me ages to learn to say. Eventually, Giovanna wrote it down for me, scrocchiarella, and comforted me that it’s really a very hard word. 

Holidays are an especial adventure at the forno. Those artists working in flour and sugar outdo themselves in December with their light and lofty pandoro even better than what I sought out in Venice (and I swear I’m not biased, not even a little bit) and a panettone so stretchy and layered, I have to close my eyes at each bite. And don’t get me started on the carnevale sweets—each day a new fritter or fried pastry, some common throughout Umbria, and some, like the snails of pastry flecked with orange peel, found only in Spello. This little bakery knows how to turn out celebrations.

But currently it’s November, still a ways from holiday treats, and the wine-must bread ended with the vendemmia, so my eyes scan the glass case for other possibilities. I look up and meet Giovanna’s eyes. “I maritozzi? Sono finiti?” I’m often too late for my favorite pastry, an unctuously soft bun filled with obscene amounts of whipped cream. 

She shakes her head, leaning a touch against the counter as she explains, “The harvest.” She gestures out beyond the door to the olive groves spilling out from Spello like a patchwork apron. “Maritozzi need a long rise, and we were too tired yesterday. Tomorrow, though.” 

Suddenly I remember all the times I’ve seen the baker’s family congregated on Via Giulia this week, loading up their three-wheeled Apes with enormous plastic crates heaped with olives. I’ve slowed my pace passing their cantina to watch them remove leaves and stems before loading olives back again to haul to the frantoio down the road. I can see Spello’s olive mill from my terrace, actually. Not only that, I can hear it. Those gears seem to be turning twenty-four hours a day right now as Ape after Ape arrives with crate after crate of olives. So many olives, they’re piled in front of the frantoio in a pyramid that threatens to dwarf the mill itself.

It’s a good year, olive-wise. Everyone says so. A banner season, which is a gift, a respite, a bit of joy after a difficult pandemic year. Volume and quality, both shine this year. What a treat to watch farmers and those townspeople with a plot of trees huddled together outside the frantoio, waiting for the first taste of new oil. 

Before I moved to Umbria, I had no idea that the flavor of new oil is like the flavor of a spring strawberry—fragrant, fresh, and oh so fleeting. Once the oil sits in the bottle for a time, the flavor dulls, the texture loosens. The oil becomes a pale facsimile of its former glory. 

Here’s what I mean: You can sauté garlic and pepper flakes in ordinary oil before tossing it with pasta, or you can simply drizzle new oil, which not only has the velvetiness of a rich cooking fat, but also the bite and the zing of carefully crafted seasonings.

It’s taken me years, but I get it now, why Umbrians vibrate with excitement as the harvest approaches, why I saw the baker grinning from ear to ear as he washed and rewashed a steel drum until it gleamed, ready to store the new oil. Umbrians are licking their collective lips, eager to taste a flavor they haven’t enjoyed in a year—olive oil, freshly pressed.

L’Oro di Spello, our town’s annual celebration of bread and oil (cancelled this year, like so many touchstones), makes visceral sense to me now, in a way it couldn’t before. The daily custom of Umbrians grilling their unsalted bread before drenching it in olive oil until the bread resembles nothing so much as a savory donut, connects us to harvests past while weaving us to each other. We who dwell in the green heart of Italy share a love of this one moment in time when the maritozzi hide in the shadows to make room for the oil. The tradition of harvesting olives, of pressing that new oil, of breathless expectation, of that first taste, together—it is central to Umbria and who Umbrians are. 

And this is why people with olive trees—and the friends they inveigle to help with the harvest—all have a wan, but satisfied, look about them. Just like Giovanna, now waiting patiently for my order.

I ask for my customary loaf of unsalted, wood-fired bread and another of the brown cereal bread I love for breakfast topped with one of the persimmons that glow from leafless trees, then a sprinkle of local Pecorino cheese. As Giovanna slides the loaves into bags, she chats about how after the harvest, they’ll start up Saturday night pizza again. Grinning, I can already taste that yeasty dough, flavored with olive oil and a scatter of herbs, or grated potatoes and savory sausage. I spare a prayer of gratitude that it’s the harvest, rather than the pandemic, that has interrupted our bakery’s flow. Aside from the masks, the plexiglass, and the “one person at a time” mandate, the forno serves the same essential function it always has—feeding a community in keeping with the season. I’m pretty sure you can still drop a chicken off at the forno in the morning and pick it up later, cooked and ready for lunch with a bit of olive-oil napped bruschetta on the side.

Calling out the requisite flurry of goodbyes to Giovanna, I think about how she and her family will head out to the groves when the bakery closes at midday. I imagine them raking the boughs of gnarled and wizened trees, delighting in the bounty raining around them. In a year when almost nothing seems to be going well for this town, this country, this world, there is still this one indelible truth:

The olives.

The olives are terrific. 

Santa Maria Maggiore’s church bells intone the hour and I let my thoughts spool away with the breeze, thinking about my own time in the groves, helping friends across the valley collect olives from their hundred trees. The serenity that bloomed with each rake, rake, rake of the boughs, surrounded on all sides by a sea of silver and green…I remember how the rhythm of that day tamed my bouncing American thoughts, soothing them until my mind and my soul rippled along with the fluttering olive leaves. 

As I pass an alley that opens onto a view of the Chiona valley, I notice that the magic of those olive trees is how they not only frame the Umbrian landscape, but how they have frame the culture. Those undulating trees have nourished a seeming eternity of Umbrians, and will continue providing oil for generations to come. 

At the sound of a pert car horn, Mio, the silver, one-eared cat, dashes across the street to scale a stone arch before slipping into the shadows. I turn to see a familiar baby-blue Fiat 500 and can’t help but grin. My friend Angelo, with his trademark laugh that crinkles his eyes, leans so far out of his wee car, I worry he may topple out the window. I walk toward him and he withdraws into the car to show me the reason for his barely concealed glee: He raises a bottle of green, new oil from Spello’s frantoio like a first place trophy. I cheer along with him. Then he waves his loaf of Umbrian bread while exalting, “Pranzo!”

Lunch. 

I clap as Angelo turns his attention to the road, suddenly intent on getting home. And I know why. 

It’s what I love about Umbria. These lucky moments aren’t rare, they happen everyday.

As ordinary, and extraordinary, as bread and oil. 

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Easter treats from Spello’s bakery in Umbria, Italy